Bishops' Pastoral Letters

The God of Peace will be with you

23 March 2020

Dear family,

Grace and peace to you from God.

As we prepare to follow the carefully discerned advice from our Ministry of Health, we want to reassure you of God’s steadfast faithfulness to each of us. We speak and sing of the faithfulness of God to each other week after week and day after day – now, in a new way, we are being asked to trust upon and live into that faithfulness.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God’s mercies never come to an end.

As a Diocese we are continuing to work hard to find creative solutions to continue being family together and to facilitate ways of sharing the creativity and compassion of each of our local faith communities.

Our desire is to keep in frequent communication through this movement on line mail network. We want to speak faith and love to each other and we want to share the good news stories of our people and our communities.

We share these words with you from the Apostle Paul:

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.

And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise. Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you.
Philippians 4:6-9

Jesus has called us into the intimacy of being family with God. As Rose Morris (BluePrint Church leader), shared so beautifully in our second life-stream service yesterday, God is not into physical distancing. Jesus is intimately with us. And as I (Justin) shared so graphically in our first service yesterday (sorry about the maggots people!), Jesus is always inviting us to be part of the down to earth reality of life with each other.

So, as people with a constant connection to the God of all goodness, may we, in turn, keep faithful to the call to love our neighbours as ourselves and thereby be instruments of God’s peace.

We know that these are very uncertain times. However, we also know that we are all in this together and we choose to hold each other deeply in the love of Christ. Breathe deeply today the breath of God. Know God’s love for you. Know God’s love for this world. Be at peace.

Yours in Christ,

+Justin and +Eleanor